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Software designers devote an average of 19.1 hours to design and coding in a typical work week of 41.5 hours, with the remainder allocated to areas such as administrative tasks, brainstorming and collaboration, waiting for tests and builds to finish, and providing environment management, according to a March survey of 443 developers by Electric Cloud. The survey included product managers, project managers/test leads, technical architects, test engineers, designers and coders.

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Silicon Valley's iD Tech is working to make girls feel welcome at its summer camps for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, which are currently dominated by boys. The camps offer a variety of STEM-related projects, including robotics, working with Legos, video game design and coding. Other colleges and tech companies are also conducting outreach efforts as they try to stop the waning interest in STEM subjects that tends to occur among girls after middle school.

The rate at which U.S. patent applications were approved in 2012 was about 20% higher than it was in 2009, which suggests that the U.S. Patent Office may have relaxed its standards during that time in order to decrease the applications backlog, a study says. In the past, the Patent Office has attributed the backlog reduction to the hiring of additional patent examiners.

An immigration bill could arrive in the Senate this week, but its potential effect on visa programs isn't clear, Alex Wilhelm writes. Lawmakers in the House are working on a separate immigration bill that appears to be quite different from the Senate proposal. "The House group is getting closer and will introduce their bill when it is ready, but the process has been very independent from the Senate process both in terms of timing and substance," a Democratic aide said.

Tech professionals working in the construction and engineering fields are making good money, according to the 2013 Computerworld Salary Survey, and enjoyed a 3.9% compensation boost over 2012. The energy and utilities, computer, automotive and business sectors weren't far behind in the top five of IT pay increases. Workers in telecom, however, didn't fare as well, with the survey reporting only a 0.4% boost in income.

Small businesses can benefit from outsourcing when the people in the organization are not skilled to perform a task or when there is a task that does not need to be done full time. Web site design, copy writing, data entry and answering the telephone are examples of tasks a small business could contract out in order to allow full-time employees to devote their hours to other work.